About me according to one of the grad students. "Every time he looks at an Overleaf document, a small piece of him dies."
"Science progresses one funeral at a time" - a paraphrasing of Planck (1950). This insightful observation also applies to administrators of the scientific enterprise.
" Simple citation analysis presupposes a highly rational model of reference-giving, in which citations are held to reflect primarily scientific appreciation of previous work of high quality or importance, and potential citers all have the same chance to cite particular papers...Such a model is obviously a grossly oversimplified and possibly highly misleading representation of reference giving..." Martin & Irvine (1980) Research Policy, 12 (1983) 61-90
“When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.” Eric Cantona (1995)
(Picasso-themed sketches courtesy of gemini@google
Latest Update(s)
Aug 13, 2025: Park et al. (2025) Very Large Scale Simulations of Network Growth with the Scalable Agent-based Simulator for Citation Analysis with sampling (SASCA-s) (submitted)
Aug 7, 2025: Milestone- we generated a network in excess of 100 million nodes using SASCA-s.
Vikram Ramavarapu (PhD in progress)
Lahari Anne (MS)
Hossein Mohasel Arjomandi (MS)
At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, I have two jobs. One as research faculty in computer science. In the second, I run a research analytics unit for the College of Engineering. The two roles complement each other although time will tell whether either have had broad impact. My work has been supported by awards from the National Institutes of Health, the US National Science Foundation, private foundations, and industry. At present, we are supported by an award from the Illinois:Insper Partnership and a grant from the NSF.
My research interests fall in an area bounded by computer science, informatics, scientometrics, the history of science, biomedical research, philosophy, and sociology. The ideas of the Kuhnian research community, center-periphery structure observed by Price and Beaver, and community detection in graphs come together- in a 'computer-sciency' sense- in my work . I am also interested in epistemic and post-epistemic misconduct- no shortage of case studies there. Before academia, I worked in industry, and, even before that, in the federal government. My PhD work concerned signaling by the low affinity Fcγ receptor on human platelets and was performed in the laboratory of Clark Anderson, MD. For a while after, I worked on proximal signaling by antigen receptors then my interests evolved towards research assessment; what is referred to as "meta-research" by some and "science of science" by others. My work does not fit well into either category.
While in biology, I was fortunate to interact with a few outstanding researchers whose influence on me is evident even today. Predictably, I also encountered a few unprincipled types who served to mark the other end of the spectrum. This calibration awakened an interest in the scientific enterprise as a living organism in a symbiotic relationship with society.
My principal collaborator is Tandy Warnow, also at Illinois. In this collaboration, we combine common and complementary interests in theory, methods development, and discovery. I currently work with David Bader from NJIT, Ananth Grama from Purdue, Pablo Robles Granda from Illinois, and Fabio Ayres from Insper, São Paulo.
More recently, we've begun to work on a new agent-based modeling project (manuscript under review). Making a refined version of the model scalable by at least one order of magnitude falls under the umbrella of the SASCA (Scalable Agent-based Simulator for Citation Analysis) project, builds upon our initial ABM work with Pablo and Ananth, and is now a collaboration with the Grama group. Other active projects concern community detection and the generation of realistic synthetic networks.
Minhyuk Park (PhD in progress). Advised by Tandy Warnow.
Vidya Kamath Pailodi (MS)
Other updates:
Vu-Le et al. (2025) Stochastic Block Models for Community Detection: The issue of edge-connectivity (submitted; https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03843v1)
Park et al (2025b) Very Large Scale Simulations of Network Growth with the Scalable Agent-based Simulator for Citation Analysis with sampling (SASCA-S) [submitted Aug 13]
Revision of ABM manuscript submitted. (July 2025). Peer review proceeds leisurely.
Milestone (July 2025) The current version of SASCA, which uses a random sampling approach, crossed the 10M node barrier. This means we can grow a 500k node network to a 14M node network in less than 30 minutes. Credits to Minhyuk Park and the rest of the group.
A vacuous editorial in Nature titled "Metascience can improve science — but it must be useful to society, too." (2025) 10.1038/d41586-025-02065-0
Milestone (May 2025): A C++ version of the SASCA code developed by Minhyuk Park passed initial testing- paving the way for significant scalability compared to the Python code described in Chacko et al. (2025).
Cardoso Lamy et al. (2025) A Graphical User Interface for Well-Connected Clusters (in revision)
Chacko et al. (2025) An agent based model (ABM) of citation behavior (preprint on arXiv)
Vu-Le et al. (2025) The EC-SBM Synthetic Network Generator. Applied Network Science. 10.1007/s41109-025-00701-2
Anne et al. (2025) RECCS: Realistic Cluster Connectivity Simulator for Synthetic Network Generation Advances in Complex Systems. 10.1142/S0219525925400041
Park et al. (2025) Improved Community Detection using Stochastic Block Models (in review)
Anne et al. (2024) Synthetic Networks That Preserve Edge Connectivity (CNA 2024)
Park et al. (2024) Improved Community Detection Using Stochastic Block Models (CNA 2024).
Park et al. (2024) Well-Connectedness and Community Detection. PLOS Complex Systems.10.1371/journal.pcsy.0000009] Preprints of original and revised submissions at 10.5281/zenodo.10607201 This article is an extended version of 10.1007/978-3-031-53499-7_1.
Ramavarapu et al. (2024) A Meta-method for Well-Connected Community Detection 10.21105/joss.06073
Park et al. (2024) "Identifying Well Connected Communities in Real-World and Synthetic Networks" Complex Networks & Their Applications XII. 10.1007/978-3-031-53499-7_1
Jakatdar et al. (2022) "AOC: Assembling overlapping communities" 10.1162/qss_a_00227
Wedell et al. (2022) "Center–periphery structure in research communities" 10.1162/qss_a_00184
Chandrasekharan et al. (2021) "Finding scientific communities in citation graphs graphs: Articles and authors 10.1162/qss_a_00095"
Devarakonda et al. (2020) "Frequently cocited publications: Features and kinetics" 10.1162/qss_a_00075
Bradley et al. (2020) "Co-citations in context. Disciplinary heterogeneity is relevant" 10.1162/qss_a_00007
Bornmann et al. (2020) "Are disruption index indicators convergently valid? The comparison of several indicator variants with assessments by peers" 10.1162/qss_a_00068
Esther Caroline Cunha Rodrigues (Insper, Brazil)
Felipe Mariano Ferreira (Insper, Brazil)
João Alfredo Cardoso Lamy (Insper, Brazil)
Tomás Alessio (Insper, Brazil)